More time = shorter letter
April 12th, 2006 by Erich Vieth“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662) Lettres provinciales.
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
Henry David Thoreau
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
Marcus T. Cicero
You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.
Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Nietzsche
The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit.
Felelon
No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all-disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report….
Woodrow Wilson
“If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.”
Mark Twain
December 8th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
Absolutely marvelous,
All the favorite quotations, and some that were obviously quoted from the previous author, but a seam of truth runs through this board…
nuff said
May 31st, 2007 at 6:38 pm
This is wonderful. How true it is, especially when one can ramble on for hours about absolutely nothing, but when asked to say something meaningful, the words escape and must be captured in a round-about way - with plenty of wordy sentences.
May 31st, 2007 at 7:40 pm
True words of wisdom. I’m glad I found this site, thanks.
May 31st, 2007 at 7:47 pm
“I’ll be there early. Sooner or later.” Sounds like something from Black Adder, does it not?
May 31st, 2007 at 7:56 pm
There’s worse than terse.
May 31st, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Huh.
May 31st, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Great. Thanks. — Short enough?
June 1st, 2007 at 10:38 am
Interesting - I received a rather short letter just yesterday. It simply read “Dear John”
June 4th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
I always wondered why it would take me 20 minutes to come up with a 2 page essay, and 3 weeks to come up with a page that said the same things.
June 7th, 2007 at 5:06 am
Excellent.
June 8th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
Yes.
June 24th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
* An aphorism is a one-line novel. (Book of aphorisms “All About Everything”? by Leonid S. Sukhorukov, UK, 2005)
June 24th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
* Those who risk nothing risk being nothing.
July 21st, 2007 at 4:33 pm
* I write in brief because I am lost for words. Leonid S. Sukhorukov
July 21st, 2007 at 4:37 pm
* Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it can also be a mersy. Leonid S. Sukhorukov (A book of 400 aphorisms “All About EWverything”, UK, 2005)
July 21st, 2007 at 4:42 pm
* Postscript
I think you think you understand my thoughts here, but I doubt you really realise that what you thought I thought is not exactly what I thought I thought. Leonid S. Sukhorukov
August 7th, 2007 at 4:25 am
* In life, everything is relative - except Einstein’s theory! Leonid S. Sukhorukov
February 9th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” This quote has been attributed to Voltaire, Ciscero, Mark Twain, Pascal and T.S. Elliot (perhaps others, too). As one whose daily bread is dependent upon the quality of one’s writing, this quote resonates within me. Anyone who writes well knows that good writing takes time. Poor writing is often poor simply because there’s no time, and hence no care, put into it. At least, this is the lesson that I attempt, on a daily basis, to impart to my young charges.
February 10th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Long and sloppy writing is rewarded in the blogosphere. The more words you post, the better the search engines like you. Therefore, there is a measurable evolutionary disincentive to write clearly and concisely.
However, the evolving Semantic Web (wiki, Scientific American) will eventually allow people to find ideas rather than blather. At that point, the evolutionary pressure will favor more readable and coherent writing. I hope.
Reading most blogs, especially the responses, would give any language savvy reader shudders. It is not so much that people don’t (or won’t) spend the extra time to clean up their writing. But rather that many seem unaware that good writing is particularly desirable or possible. Most of them obviously don’t use the FireFox web browser to have instant spell checking everywhere. How much effort would that take?
November 21st, 2008 at 12:20 pm
I find it mildly humorous that this post is around 200 words when it could be 20.
Good collection of quotes on the topic of writing.
December 10th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
“Perfection is attained, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
December 10th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Makes me think of President-elect Obama’s prolix rhetoric.
December 10th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
“The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit.”
This is a good marketing advise…
December 10th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
If only Leonid S. Sukhorukov were clever enough to write less.
December 11th, 2008 at 1:06 am
In one his of his lectures on music broadcast by radio, the late Dr. Karl Haas
entitled a program on leitmotiv as “To make a short story long.” Wasn’t
that saying a lot?
December 11th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Interesting.
Does anyone have an idea of who “Felelon” is? The only information that can be found on the internet appears to be his quote, so I guess it must be either misspelled or unknown. Any ideas?
December 11th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Felelon is really Fenelon (probably). Note also “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes” from Edward Everett who opened for Lincoln before his “Gettysburg Address.”
December 11th, 2008 at 10:48 am
Good perspectives. I strongly agree, nevertheless I think there are some (only some) things which need to be explained in detail. So many words, so many thinkings, so many things to say… it would be a waste leave all of them.
Who’s Felelon?
Can be this one? Searching by the phrase… ¿François Fénelon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_F%C3%A9nelon
Regards.
December 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Check out these related posts, Describing yourself in one word or less. See also, “Your biography in six words.”
December 11th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
While grade school teachers reward wordiness and long word counts with loads of filler for anyone going into the business world its all about getting right to the point and being brief. In comparison to writing everything you can think of on the page, in writing a targeted and brief piece of writing every word and sentence needs to be tweaked not only for word count but for meaning as well! Great quotes demonstrating this!
December 11th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Ichabod
December 11th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
“The only art is to omit.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson
December 12th, 2008 at 5:52 am
December 12th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Richard: Reductio ad absurdum.
I lunched with a fellow who showed me a self-published book by a guy with whom he agrees. Yet the book was steaming mounds of incoherent text that desperately needed to have had an editor. Or at least a spell checker!
Useful technique: Read your prose aloud to someone who hasn’t heard it before. Look for boredom or confusion. Let them interrupt.
December 20th, 2008 at 10:21 am
k